1 Plus 1: Shanghai Tweaks Child Rules

Thirty years after China began enforcing a one-child policy, city officials will offer emotional counseling and financial incentives to couples willing to have a second.

DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — Thirty years after China began enforcing a one-child policy, this city is actively encouraging young couples to have a second child.

City officials are planning to visit homes, slip leaflets under doors and offer emotional counseling and financial incentives.

The world’s most populous country, it seems, wants to be a little bigger.

The new push, which aims to tackle growing worries about the country’s shrinking work force and aging population, is the most public effort yet to counter a policy that is considered both a tremendous success and a terrible failure. While it has kept population growth under control, it has also led to forced abortions.

China is not doing away with the one-child policy, which still largely applies to urban residents, but is allowing more exceptions to the rule. Shanghai, with 20 million residents one of China’s biggest cities, is leading the effort.

“We advocate eligible couples to have two kids because it can help reduce the proportion of the aging people and alleviate a work force shortage in the future,” Xie Lingli, director of the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission, was quoted as saying in the Friday issue of China Daily, the country’s largest English-language newspaper.

Already, ethnic minorities are allowed to have more than one child, and many rural residents can have a second child if the first child is a girl, because many families still follow tradition and favor male heirs.

But over the decades, China’s urban residents have faced greater restrictions, enforced with a variety of incentives and fines.

Now, those restrictions are being lifted. A couple made up of two parents who have no siblings themselves can now have a second child.

That is the demographic Shanghai is appealing to in the hope of rebalancing a population that is aging fast, with about 22 percent of its residents already over the age of 60.

The country as a whole is facing a similar problem. In 2006, about 8 percent of China’s population was over the age of 65. But that proportion is expected to triple to about 322 million people, or nearly a quarter of the country’s population, by 2050, according to the United Nations.